Gadgetory

the Apple watch series 4 was the most impressive thing that Apple announced last week I've been reviewing it since then and I gotta tell ya it lives up to the hype now we should start with the hardware because more than on any other part of this watch the hardware is where they really knocked it out of the park for the very first time since basically the original Apple watch the hardware here has been fully redesigned there's new sizes new screens your speakers and of course there's new stuff inside it but it still looks like an Apple watch so let's really get into it so at the series 4 there's two new sizes there's 40 millimeter and 44 millimeter this is a 44 millimeter now before this I was using the 42 millimeter size the bigger size on the series 3 and it's only subtly bigger than it was before but it's also subtly thinner and to me the trade-off is totally worth it you're really not going to notice that difference all that much and I think that also is going to apply to people who prefer the smaller watch before we get too deep into this we really should talk pricing because these watches they're they're really not that cheap the least expensive model is the 40 millimeter with GPS plus Wi-Fi and that's 399 but there's a whole bunch of add-ons you can do so let's take a look here it's 30 bucks more for the larger size if you want to get LTE that's usually about 100 bucks more plus the 10 bucks a month or so your carrier's gonna charge you if you want to get one of the steel models that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 bucks more you also could add AppleCare on top of that you could easily spend six seven hundred bucks on one of these things without even noticing it and don't even get me started on the Hermes Bob series for looks and basically the same as before it's got the same laws of the shape and the same two button layout but Apple is really careful with the curves on these larger size so that it's still compatible with existing watch bands even third-party watch bands still look fine on these watches where things start to look different is when the screen turns on because the screens on these watches are just they're just incredibly good they're 30% bigger than the old models and they go closer to the edge of the watch and they make the screens on the older generations of the Apple wash look really I mean Crampton the corners of the screen are rounded so it just feels more natural to the watch it's still OLED so the blacks are still true black and these screen is big and they're beautiful and I love them moving on there are some other changes to the hardware you should know about so the back is now ceramic instead of metal it's and that's to allow wireless signals to pass through the ceramic getting a better reception they've moved the microphone over here in between the two buttons and that makes it better for calls but the thing that actually makes it better for calls is the louder speaker on this side it's seriously like SuperDuper loud on the inside there is a faster processor of course there's bluetooth 5.0 on the w3 wireless chip and there's a new set of more accurate sensors which is going to become important later there's also this haptic feedback when you turn the digital crown which I thought would be gimmicky but I actually really like it the other thing that they've done if you get the LTE model is there's no longer a big dumb red dot on the digital crown that's just a nice little subtle red ring now so good job as for battery life well it's stupendous I use this thing all weekend without charging it and that included walking around for a couple of hours using maps making a couple calls on LTE and also doing some workout stuff which is not me but I did it for science and I didn't have to charge this thing until the end of the day on Sunday Apple says that it gets about 18 hours of battery life or you can do about six hours of outdoor workout time and you know what they totally hit that number in fact the battery life is so good that I wish Apple gave me an option to have the screen just be always on all the time so you don't have to twist your wrist to see the time but you can't do that you still got a twister wrist see the time it's fine so the newest version of watch OS is watch on us five and honestly it's kind of a grab bag of new features there's support for podcasts and streaming app amuse ik and new fitness and health options and walkie-talkie mode and you can open links in iMessage to webpages and they get displayed automatically in readability mode oh no hooray for the web I love reading the web on my watch now you might remember that last year's Apple watch had some launch issues with LTE but a petha fix was up pretty quickly and this year I haven't had any major problems with LTE in fact when people have called me and I've used the watch to take the call they didn't believe I wasn't talking to them on the phone and the speaker on this thing is so loud you don't have to like hold it up to your ear to hear people you can just kind of hold your wrist naturally and like actually have a conversation that's really impressive but it still does take the watch a minute or two to get connected on LTE which can be a little bit frustrating because you don't know if it's gonna work or not and that's most clear and most obvious with Siri Siri is still Siri one new neat feature is you can just raise your wrist and start talking and see really respond but I don't know a lot of the time instead of a series becoming available it just says hang on dot and I'll tap you when I'm ready dot dot dot and you just never really trust Siri to work the first time that you use it now there's also some software features that are exclusive to the series for and that includes new watch faces the electrocardiogram feature and fall detection the new watch faces are designed to show just how big these new Apple watch screens are and some of them are beautiful I especially love the water watch face which like has an animated water and shows a clock and I think it's great but the one that Apple is showing off is called infograph and it's designed to show off how many complications they can fit on a single screen I'm okay with a ton of complications but the colors here are just they're all over the place this one's orange and this one's yellow and this one goes from green to yellow and I know some people are gonna like it but I super don't oh and Apple still isn't allowing third-party wash faces which is kind of a bummer I'd really like to get an information dense watch screen like this without so many just everywhere so the walkie-talkie feature on the Apple watch is pretty cool to use it both you and your friend have to agree to be friends and you both have to be available and the reason that exists is the first time you talk to somebody on the walkie-talkie mode your voice just calls out from their watch so to do it you hit the complication or open up the app you tap on the name of the person you want to talk to you and then there's just a big yellow talk button and you just hold your finger down on it and you talk so you could say hey Dan how's it going I'm calling you in walkie talkie obviously so that's nice but the first time you do it there's this message that says connecting to Dan because what walkie-talkie mode actually is is a FaceTime call that's just interrupted by you tapping the push-to-talk button so Dan just replied hey I'm doing really good we're just demoing this on video for you I'll probably do this a couple of times yeah it works really well except that this is pretty great but you have to use your other hand to tap the thing you can't push a button and it's also like if you've got one of your hands full you basically can't use this thing right that's the other problem with it I have a trick hang on the trick if you've got a coffee in your hand is a new thing that I'm calling nose calling where the thing is Dan you can use your nose it totally works the health and fitness side of watch OS 5 is in a lot of ways a lot more interesting because Apple is separating out the ideas of fitness and health so on the fitness side the new features are you can do these like workout competitions with your friends over the course of a week and it will also do automatic workout detection in case you forget to open up the little app and hit start or a head workout on the health side of the equation it's doing a bunch of interesting stuff so it can now detect low heart rates for example and later this year it's going to be able to detect irregular heart rates too it can also do fall detection which is a really interesting feature and I think it's really gonna benefit a lot of people it can automatically detect with these new sensors whether or not you've had a hard fall and if it thinks you've fallen and hurt yourself it will offer to call emergency services and if you don't respond within a minute or something it will just go ahead and call those services and also text your emergency contacts to let them know that something might be wrong I have been trying to manually trigger the fall detection by curling myself onto the bed or the couch and it hasn't worked yet I don't know maybe the watch can tell that I'm acting I do think it's a great feature I just can't tell you whether or not it super works the headline-grabbing feature of the series 4 is the new electrocardiogram feature so it's got sensors on the bottom also on the digital crown you hold it down and takes a reading and then you can send a PDF to your doctor unfortunately they haven't turned that on yet so I can't test it and tell you what you're not when Apple introduced the very first Apple watch it was it was kind of a mess it was trying to do way too much and both the software and the hardware just couldn't live up to what they're trying to do with it and on top of that Apple really didn't know what the watches purpose was but since then they've really figured it out and this year they focused on making everything better it has a better screen it has better speed it has better fitness features and most of all it has better health features now there are still some things I'd like to see improved I wish there were more watch space options and series still kind of unreliable and you know these things are still pretty expensive especially given how quickly Apple's iterating them it makes deciding whether or not to upgrade are really hard call but if you have an older Apple watch I think you're gonna be blown away by this year's updates heck it makes me feel bad that about the series 3 last year because this one is so much better bottom line if you've been waiting to buy or upgrade an Apple watch now's a really good time to get one you know what I mean there are a lot of complications when it comes to buying an Apple watch and people are watching to see what we think of it look I'm kind of expensive if people just need to know the time time is money